Saturday, January 30, 2016

Blog Banter 71: When too many is too many?

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 71st edition! For more details about what the blog banters are please visit the Blog Banter page.

Too Many Ships Spoil the Sandpit?

We all like important internet spaceships right? The more spaceships the better right? Or are we getting too many to be easily to remember them all. A Mastodon on scan? That the hell is that and what does it do? Oh! Never mind!

Are we getting too many ships. Is it too complicated to remember them all and what their traits are? Do FC's these days need an encyclopedic knowledge of ship types unless they want their fleet to DIAF. With more and more ships being released each year will we ever reach "too many" or do you think there can never be too many important internet spaceship types?

Banter on!

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You can often hear people say that it's all about spaceships in EVE. When Incarna expansion, that introduced captain's quarters, was deployed back in 2011 there was a huge "storm" from player base. A lot of players were upset that they were being forced to use this feature which opened up a lot more wounds such as lack of focus on actual spaceships and gameplay surrounding them. Not to get too much into history, but CCP got the message and since then, spaceships were going to be one of their main focus. Even in the very next expansion Crucible they have introduced at the time so called t3 battlecruisers: Talos, Tornado, Oracle and Naga.

Since then we have seen a lot of new ships introduced to our universe and a lot of changes related to gameplay. Before going any further I must come out and say that I haven't flown any of the new ships since 2012. One of the reasons is that I simply haven't had a need for them. For my wormhole stalking Stratios is too weak to initiate tackle, though certainly beats Proteus on solo hunt. I haven't done any cosmic sites to use Astero and I haven't flown a ship without cloak for awhile so no new destroyers or cruisers. I considered to adopt Nestor for my doctrine, but that with that price tag it did not make much sense. But it's highly likely I will do a break from wormhole hunting and join some k-space corp at some point to fully engage in experience. It will probably feel like a new game to me.

In general, I think new ships are great, but CCP must be cautions. More ships means harder to balance. This problem existed since the beginning. Nerf hammer was going around, hitting different ships. When I started in 2010 Gallente was considered EVE on hard mode. After rebalancing blasters, drones and nerfing other races it became EVE on easy mode. With more ships in the pot it will only be harder to achieve harmony.

But if there's at least some harmony, having many different tools (ships) will make game more exciting. It certainly makes it harder for FCs to manage the field and raises the knowledge bar, but that's not a bad thing.

The only time I think adding ships spoils the sandpit is when CCP tries hard to make dangerous spaces accessible for new players. Take for instance Venture. A gas mining ship that is hard to catch, costs peanuts, and is used by everyone regardless of their age. Same ship mines most cheap and most lucrative gases. I know a lot of people will disagree and that's fine. It's just my personal opinion. If there are cheap and expensive options to mine ore, why gas sites are treated differently?

Other than that, I think it's a great time to play EVE. Reading stories about command destroyers using micro jump drive on enemies makes me really excited. Things like these add a lot of value to the game. The more unpredictable the fight is the better. I just wish they looked at battleships a bit. With so many cruisers, frigates and destroyers, I feel battlecruisers and especially battleships might be left out of all the fun. I think it's the perfect time to settle down with new ship introduction and do some cleanup and organizing in our sandbox.

1 comment
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I think the only danger of more ships is when it makes other ships redundant. The Stratios has, for the most part, made cloaky T3's redundant but at least they have the fitting flexibility to be useful in other ways. So far I think CCP have done a pretty good job avoiding that redundancy, buffing T1 and Faction Cruisers so there's less of a void between them and their Tech II variants and including a swathe of ships that can take advantage of frigate sized wormhole connections. It's not perfect, but it's decent.

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